Nimble Code: Tag google

Bad Day for Amazon

2006-02-09T15:53:00-08:00

It seems like it was only yesterday that I was loudly praising the bold moves Amazon was making in search, but now that is probably going to end. The head of Amazon’s A9 search service Udi Manber has jumped ship to Google. Bummer for Amazon. I guess Google is becoming the Microsoft of search, scooping up everybody eventually.

Yahoo and Google's Recruitment Gambles

2005-12-21T22:07:00-08:00

Jason Kottke had a really interesting point earlier this month about Yahoo’s del.icio.us purchase that I just read today (been catching up), when he says:

There’s an interesting story in here somewhere about how Yahoo! is hiring/buying the “alpha geeks” (hackers, tinkerers, accidental entrepreneurs) and Google seemingly isn’t (Ph.Ds, computer scientists) and what effect that could have on each company’s development.

Spot on. It seems like Google has been focusing its efforts lately mainly on acquiring key smart people (even if that means buying their whole company), content acquisition (ie, Keyhole for satellite data, the sitemap protocol for deep web access), and advertising/advertising/advertising! Meanwhile, Yahoo has been looking for new talent with proven success to snap up. Their strategy could really be defined as platforms. Amazon has also been doing this to some degree through their internal Robot Coop front company, but I expect they might start buying outside sites as well if they prove successful (good luck there LibraryThing!). It’s nice for the big guys; someone else takes the risk of building the product and they can scoop it up – users and all – if it sticks.

This has been described as competing strategies of brains vs. hackers. Which is certainly true, but there are some interesting other dimensions to consider. I read an interview with Eric Schmidt of Google where he named the not invented here attitude as one of Google’s biggest concerns moving forward. And looking at their strategy, it seems like Google might be struggling with that problem now, preferring to create their own copies of existing successful products (Googlemaps and Gmail have done well, but what about Google Base or Orkut?). Of course, Yahoo is taking its own risks here (their strategy is essentially treating geeks like value stocks vs. Google’s growth stocks), but I ultimately feel they might succeed. A lot of radical web stuff lately has been done by the new people, the unknows (think Ruby on Rails or Del.icio.us), and Yahoo has been more poised to recognize it. Will their riskier unknowns best Google’s smart people with big reputations? I think so, unless Google’s hiding something really big up its sleeves to spring in 2006.

On a related note, John Battelle has published his industry predictions for 2006 and it’s an interesting read. Although he sometimes stumbles, he generally does a good job of being on the mark, as his review of 2005’s predictions shows. Check it out.

Google Web Accelerator

2005-05-10T21:44:00-07:00

If you want an excellent lesson in how web specifications can knock into modern DHTML interface design, check out this post at Signal vs. Noise on how the well-meaning goals of Google Web Accelerator have wreaked havoc on modern interactive web sites. Be sure to read the comments as well. I would post more commentary on this here, but I have already spent enough time following it up in the thread over there.

Best Web Mashup Yet

2005-05-05T12:11:00-07:00

Supergreg has created a great but possibly short-lived combination of competing web-services, combining Yahoo's Traffic Conditions RSS with Google Maps to make the best traffic conditions mapper I've seen yet. See if before it goes away (a cease and desist is probably on its way now) at Supergreg's Site.

The New Web Math, Or How SOAP Adds Up To Nothing

2005-04-25T00:06:00-07:00

Last week saw the intriguing web mashups of combining two popular web services in one place. So, first there was combining Craigslist Real Estate listings with Google Maps, which although slow is really quite amazing to behold. Then someone else hacked Gmail + Del.icio.us, using Google's mail service to capture contents on bookmarked pages at the bookmarking time. Not to mention Adrian's trailblazing mix of Google Maps and Chicago transit info.

All of these are amusing and technically well-executed hacks, but what is most amazing to me is not the front-end combinations, but the ease in which it is possible to mix web tools in the back end to create new powerful services. And I have been especially struck by how SOAP has been utterly unnecessary for this to happen. In fact, I would argue that the strict COM-style model of SOAP is exactly the problem here, in that SOAP requires such effort and planning, it resists such freeform discovery of capabilities beyond what the creators of products imagine. REST seems to have a natural advantage here in that it builds on the inherent procedural model of HTTP and thus can evolve as naturally as websites do. Combine that with dynamic HTML tricks and we can see how nimble code can outmaneuver the heavyweight mechanics of SOAP again and again.

For a more lengthy and detailed critique of SOAP, see my earlier post, Radical Simplification

Google Maps And The Transparent Society

2005-04-13T11:46:00-07:00

Well, after the initial excitement over Google Maps had died down, the mounting concerns over user privacy were inevitable. Some of these have been quite clever, but I imagine there are other bloggers out there seriously concerned about the evil swarm of satellites spying on them. Have we reached an Orwellian future where our every motion is tracked?

Relax. I think not. For starters, as people have noted, a satellite taking photos of your patch of sod every six months is hardly a threat to your autonomy. If anything, your privacy is probably more threatened by the myriad private cameras monitoring your city's streets, not to mention the large dossiers compiled by (and stolen from) credit reporting agencies and personal databases like LexisNexis or Choicepoint. At least with Google Maps, the people are still in control. Indeed, I think there is a profound difference between a society where a powerful few control the cameras (ie, Orwell's police state) and one where any of us can look through the viewfinder. As Jeffrey Veen notes

Ultimately Orwell was right: everything we do will be watched. But he was wrong about the government building it. We did it ourselves. Which means where Matt sees chemistry, I see environmental accountability. Where others see surveillance, I see corporate whistle-blowing. It reminds me of the Surfrider Foundation's project to get kayakers in the San Francisco Bay to cameraphone the bilge coming out out of container ships. What happens when thousands of grassroots activists can click-and-drag through the remote places in this country? Clearcut! Oil spill! You can't dump that there -- we're watching!

Indeed, this seems to be a clear benefit of opening satellite views to all. An ordinary person doesn't really do anything significant enough to be seen from outer space. But, lots of corporations and governments and other massive entities do. And where normally they could hide their various deeds in remote places fenced off from the outside world and spun away by crack PR efforts, they still can be seen by satellite. For example, be sure to check out the the look of clearcutting in British Columbia, described by Mezzoblue:

A picture is worth a thousand words and all that, so here’s a 4000 word essay on what the forestry industry is doing in British Columbia, as of whatever the date was when the satellite snapped these.

I must interject here that I find it amazing that I can examine the effects of the forestry industry in Vancouver without leaving my desk in New York. Maybe there is something to old dot-com boom adage that the Internet obliterates geography! Getting back on topic though, this discussion of uses leads back to the most important question about any spying technology. Who is doing the spying is much more important than what they are spying on. That is the point made by David Brin in his essay (and subsequent book) The Transparent Society back in 1997. Assuming that we can keep cameras out of people's home (a bad thing all around), we have to pretty much accept the fact that the technologies of surveillance are proliferating in public spaces. So, he posits there is really a choice between two societies:

The Orwellian nightmare state where the cameras are manned by a vigilant and arbitary police force
The transparent society, where anybody can look through any camera

Why is the second choice better? Perhaps these environmentalist examples with Google Maps illustrate that nicely. It is just that much harder for secrets and corruption to flourish in such a system (hence the transparent in the name), and the technology helps to empower the citizen rather to suppress him. Now, I am no technological utopianist or wild-eyed cypherpunk, and I would prefer a society without widespread surveillance of course. But if it is coming (and it is), I think the more transparent we can make it, the better our future will be.

Google Tourism

2005-04-07T09:36:00-07:00

Yesterday, I was talking about Google maps and I mentioned using it for Virtual Tourism. Well, now someone has set up a blog for just that (Google Sightseeing). Check it out.

I Can See My House From Here. And Yours Too.

2005-04-07T07:00:00-07:00

Second day blogging and I am already late to the party in talking about the changes Google has made to the Maps program by incorporating the satellite imagery from Keyhole. The result is very cool, not just because it's neat to see things from space, but because the map functionality is overlaid right onto the satellite data as well (as John Park shows with his bike route). What I like about this is what I also like about people using the maps with Flickr's annotation capabilities to present memory maps or people doing "virtual tourism" of sorts to get a feel of geography from afar, in that there's a real sense of play and fun and hacking going on with Google Maps that I haven't seen with a web service for a while. I will talk more about this later, since I think it's the difference between a successful web service and a dud.